Vice President Kamala Harris will hold a rally in Pennsylvania on Tuesday to announce her running mate.
This will be Harris’ first visit to Pennsylvania as the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, after formerly securing the nomination on Monday. The trip also marks her seventh visit to the commonwealth this year and the 17th since she was sworn in as vice president in 2021.
During the event, Harris will introduce her running mate, although it still remains unclear who that will be. She has reportedly narrowed her choice down to two candidates: Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz.
The Harris campaign is touting enthusiasm in Pennsylvania, saying that more than 33,000 people have signed up to volunteer for the campaign in the commonwealth in just the last 15 days, according to a news release signed by Jack Doyle, Pennsylvania communications director. The campaign has nearly 300 staffers across 36 offices, including in swing counties like Erie, Luzerne, and Northampton. The campaign said it is also working to make inroads in historically Republican areas in Union, Lancaster and York counties.
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The campaign also said that Harris is “barnstorming” Pennsylvania while former President Trump, her main opponent in November’s election, is “struggling to keep up.” It said Trump’s campaign “lags far behind in the infrastructure needed to win with just three offices in Pennsylvania” and has “shown he doesn’t want these voters.”
Trump survived an assassination at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, on July 13 and said he would return there for another rally in the future. He held a rally in Harrisburg last week.
The vice president is looking to show a contrast between herself and the former president in Pennsylvania, with her campaign saying she is “fighting for our freedoms, democracy and an economy that provides everyone the opportunity to not just get by, but get ahead” while “Trump’s toxic Project 2025 agenda would take our country backward by enacting a national abortion ban, raising costs for the middle class, and giving Trump virtually unchecked power.”
Project 2025 is a controversial initiative organized by conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation that was authored by a number of conservatives, including some former Trump administration officials.
The initiative offers right-wing policy recommendations for Trump should he win the presidency, including replacing civil service employees with Trump loyalists, abolishing the Department of Education, criminalizing pornography, eliminating DEI programs, cutting funding for Medicaid and Medicare, rejecting abortion as health care and infusing the government with Christian values.
Trump has sought to distance himself from the initiative, which has been criticized as being an authoritarian and Christian nationalist plan that would undermine civil liberties, saying he knows nothing about it, that parts of it are “absolutely ridiculous and abysmal” and that its backers are on the “radical right.”
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This is the first presidential election since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, giving states the power to make their own laws on abortion access. The Harris campaign cited polling showing that a majority of Pennsylvania voters support some abortion access.
“Vice President Harris will ensure women have the power to make decisions about their own bodies once again,” her campaign said in a news release. “That contrast will be front and center here” in Pennsylvania.
The Harris campaign also said the Trump administration killed more than 275,000 jobs in Pennsylvania, including thousands of manufacturing jobs, and oversaw record-high unemployment.
It said Harris and President Biden inherited an economy “left in shambles” by Trump but that she helped create more than half a million jobs in Pennsylvania and capped prescription drug costs for millions of Pennsylvania residents on Medicare.
Touting her previous experience as a prosecutor in California, Harris’ campaign said she is committed to keeping communities safe and locking up dangerous crooks, criminals and predators. The campaign said the murder rate in Pennsylvania, particularly Philadelphia, soared during the Trump administration while Harris “has taken on the gun lobby and helped bring a historic drop in violent crime.”
“If Trump gets a second term, he will once again cozy up to the NRA and make it easier for weapons to get into the hands of convicted criminals,” the campaign said in the news release.
The campaign also highlighted the electoral losses Trump and his endorsed candidates have suffered in Pennsylvania in 2018, 2020 and 2022. The campaign pointed to Trump’s loss to Biden in 2020, as well as Republican Mehmet Oz’s 2022 loss to now-Democrat Sen. John Fetterman and Republican Doug Mastriano’s 2022 loss to now-Democrat Gov. Shapiro.
“Republicans, too, lost ground in every corner of the Commonwealth as reproductive freedom and protecting our democracy were front and center for voters,” the Harris campaign said in the news release. “And reasonable Republicans across the commonwealth continue to reject Trump, with more than 158,000 people voting against Trump in the Pennsylvania Republican primary, nearly two months after Nikki Haley dropped out of the race.”
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